Sep 1, 2008

How To Maintain Your Search Rankings After Web Redesign?

Redesigning web sites and adding fresh content is not a new subject for any webmasters. But, there are many webmasters and web owners who does not redesign and refresh their web sites because they fear that they will loose their site’s rankings and visitors and have to start the SEO process from scratch. This is obviously true because one has spent many years and thousands of dollars to promote their site in order to gain traffic.

However, if we don’t redesign then the web site is giving a negative expression to the customer and traffic.

Hence, we have 5 major suggestions to all the webmasters and web owners who have feared this task for a long period of time.

5 Effectual Keys to Maintain Your Search Rankings after Web Redesign:

File Name:

File name is very essential because it works as your identity. Thus, we do not recommend you to change your file name until it’s very necessary to reorganize your file hierarchy. This is because renaming your file increases the risk of loosing your search engine rankings and visitors.However, in many cases renaming your file is a must and there is no other option.

Therefore, in this critical case we suggest you to use 301 redirection solutions because renaming your file with this tool will help you to drive your customers and visitors to your website even after changing your file name. Further more, it will also help you to regain your rankings.

Content Management System:

Using CMS for content management is a common procedure for all webmasters for managing their web content. But, this can be risky sometime because it carries a high possibility of destroying your rankings. Therefore, we highly suggest you to ensure that your changed URL is hooted by 301 redirects and its better to find those types of systems which suggest clean and simple URL strings with negligible extra characters.

Alt Tags:

Keep the optimized alt tags for the images on the site. In case of header images and image based navigation is being completely updated make sure to follow the same guidelines with the alt tags as in the original design. It’s better to copy them from the original and replace them for the image.

Removing Alt Tags not only hampers your images but it also declines the rankings.

Meta Tags:

Meta tag is very important and we suggest you to copy them form your original version to the new version without making any changes. The title tag is very important because it consist of major values of your site. Similarly, keyword tag, description tag should also be copied from old version of your web to the new one.

Content:

The content of your page plays an important role in your site ranking and placement. Thus, we suggest you not to make any changes in your content of your site because it may hamper your site’s ranking.

If your site is going for a new and a fresh textual content then ensure the keyword density, frequency and weight is maintained. Make sure you are copying all the necessary items from you old version into the new one, for example keep items such as mid-sentence (inline) text links (especially if they link to internal pages on your own site), heading tags, and keyword placement within the top portions of the new site.